Jody, according to Google Trends, searches for “malarkey” did indeed spike again when Biden said it.
Farai Chideya
Earlier today, Biden spoke with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about whether the Democratic Party was having trouble speaking to working-class white voters. Biden said: “I think we have, in part. And the reason is we’ve been consumed with crisis after crisis after crisis. And so I go in my old neighborhoods, and they go, ‘Joe. Hey, Joe, over here. What about me?’ And I say, ‘Well, look, all these things that are happening.’”
Biden is from Scranton, Pennsylvania. The surrounding county, Lackawanna, has been solidly blue for decades. But Trump campaigned in the area today, making his case for the working-class white voters Biden has worried about. A Wall Street Journal article on the GOP nominee’s campaign stop said 3,011 Lackawanna Democrats switched their voter registration to Republican this year, versus 502 who did the reverse. “Statewide, 80,674 Democrats have become Republicans in 2016,” the article continues, “compared with 28,522 Republicans who became Democrats.”
Clare Malone
Biden seemed desperate in his speech to take the crowd away from chants and sloganeering — he seemed bashful when some of the words in his speech were turned into a “not a clue” chant. He seemed to want the crowd to stop and contemplate the utter absurdity of Trump, of his unprecedented tenor as a candidate of a major American party. This is the Joe Biden of moral authority — the video that introduced him focused on his work in the Senate against genocide, domestic violence and the gun lobby. He lowered his voice and asked the crowd to hear him out — they did.
